A Decade Ago, Jeff Bezos Bought a Newspaper. Now He’s Paying Attention to It Again.
During his tenure as executive editor at The Washington Post, Martin Baron ran into a persistent problem.
Jeff Bezos had purchased The Post for $250 million in 2013, less than a year after Mr. Baron had taken over. Mr. Bezos, who arrived at media ownership after founding Amazon and remaking online shopping, wanted his top editor to transform the newspaper from a regional news organization into a truly global one.
But Mr. Bezos, whose representatives kept an eye on the budget, didn’t believe The Post needed to add many new editors to accomplish that task. Reporters were classified as “direct” employees and editors as “indirect” — and his preference was to keep the “indirect” numbers down.
So, Mr. Baron came up with a workaround, according to his coming memoir.
“To avoid setting off alarms up the line, my deputies and I would strip the word ‘editor’ from proposed new positions whenever possible,” Mr. Baron writes. “‘Analyst’ or ‘strategist’ were among the limited set of workarounds.”
Source: The New York Times
